21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Reanimated AI Greta Garbo stars again … in a ball-bearing advert.
She shimmered in Hollywood’s silent movie era and lit up the first talkies – now Greta Garbo may be about to star in cinema’s new AI age.
More than a century after her screen debut and decades after her ashes were laid to rest in a Swedish woodland cemetery, the Hollywood superstar’s descendants are ready to consider an AI version of her taking a 21st-century film role.
Her likeness has already been reanimated for an advert for a Swedish industrial company, using AI generation technology. The practice some critics call “ghostploitation” has also been used in the case of the actor Val Kilmer, who died last year.
Asked if the AI Garbo could be cast in other roles, Craig Reisfield, one of three relatives who manage her legacy, told the Guardian: “I won’t say no, especially having seen what I’ve seen. It’s pretty incredible and lifelike. So what’s to say that you can’t bring Greta Garbo back in some kind of fashion in a film role?”
Reisfield said he was “flabbergasted” when he saw the AI version of his great-aunt created for publicity for the ball-bearings giant SKF. The connection comes because Garbo’s second-ever screen role was in a 1921 promotional film involving the Gothenburg-based company.
In 1986 when he cowrote July 20, 2019: Life in the 21st Century, Arthur C. Clarke could foresee 21st century technology that would be able to reanimate the appearances and voices of long-dead actors. But he didn’t anticipate how 60 years of negative PR concerning AI – not least of which the epochal 1968 film he cowrote with Stanley Kubrick that gave the world one of the first movie supercomputers running amok and trying to kill every nearby human. And thus, the above Grauniad article gives AI Garbo a one star review, and the video is getting absolutely hammered by negative comments on YouTube:
